Tanker Projects from The Port of Corpus Christi

Over the past 2 weeks, I’ve been plein air painting and focusing on a project to capture some of the port area around Corpus Christi, Texas. One of my friends from facebook suggested I paint the Harbor Bridge, and another suggested the USS Lexington. The USS Lexington CV-16 is immortalized in Corpus Christi Bay, South Texas, USA as a museum.

So, over the past few weeks, I started this project as a few tankers entered and exited our port. Here is my first work:

The original drawing for the harbor bridge project. Notice how I added the shadow into my drawing. This is not always necessary, but I felt like I needed it to direct my painting.This was my first ship with the Harbor Bridge in background. It was a breakthrough piece of painting for me. Better color and tone.

I really like how the colors worked in this project. So I focused on the same colors for the USS Lexington. Both works are similar in color and somewhat tone. I was pretty pleased with both works .

Unlike the first work, this work included the jetty and its walkway with a few figures. The jetty rocks were made simply by using my senior discount card (popularized by Herman Pekel). This is the simple technique of coloring in the rocks with a deep color and then cutting the card against the paper to create texture. In this work, I did use a lot of white wash to give the work some depth.

In my last work of this project, I painted a large tanker entering our port.

My original drawing for the Exxon tanker.Exxon is coming to town! This is a large tanker making its way to the port of Corpus Christi.

Again, in the forground, I used some spackling technique as well as my senior card for some forground texturing. I was quite pleased with this set of paintings, so today, I set out and painted another open air painting of some ships in the port. This time, I used a number of scenes including a tug and pelican to round out my final work. The following is a series of photos from the morning painting. I did finish the work in studio because it started to rain.

The original photo of the tanker from Hong Kong. My main subject in the port this morning.

I’m set up and ready to start drawing, then paint!

My original Port Project Drawing. This was a beautiful ship from Hong Kong. Not sure exactly what it was doing.

This is the first quick wash including the sky , some of the boat and foreground.

This is close to finishing the washes and painting the ship before it began to rain.

Here is a quick photo of a tug. This I used in the final piece and added it in the studio.

Here is a photo of a pelican that I also added to my final work!

My original painting when I added a tub and pelican to the final work for better balance and color. It was a little weak without the added subjects.

This is my original piece with a Tug boat and Pelican added later in the studio